Urban Planning as a Crucial Tool in Mitigating Flooding: Protecting Society and Environment

Flooding, a natural disaster, has always been a critical threat to creatures which is mainly caused by the characteristic of being unchangeable, and for instead, people can only try to decrease the negative impacts those natural hazards bring to the society and the environment. As a student who has taken geography since walking into the high school, natural disasters have also been a popular topic for scholars to notice at as it is a practical topic that overcomes the obstacle between human geography and physical geography, which is another fierce argument: do the geographers need to work across the boundary between human and nature.

In 2021, there has been a case of flooding happened in London due to series of problems: floodplains around the Thames and River Lea, lack of drainage system in the city, and too much urbanization. Therefore, it can be seen that: to reduce the impacts flooding brought to people, solutions in the aspect of urban planning are necessary. The structure of urban planning includes how different systems ( traffic system, public infrastructure, etc) being distributed in a region and these are directly related to the causes of the flooding in 2021. It is valuable to investigate how urban planning can contribute to the reduction processes on flooding to the society.

To represent the importance of focusing on the relationship between urban planning and flooding more directly and clearly, several examples are listed:

1. Protect the rights of humans.

For humans, few different rights are threatened through the occurrence of a natural disaster: life safety and and a person’s own assets. Both of these rights will directly affect a person’s or a household’s living standard significantly. For example, flooding can hurt people in physical and mental health at the same time, furthermore, the assets (such as housing and cars) can be destroyed easily.

2. Maintain the working system among a city.

The working system is mainly referring to the public infrastructure, or other constructions used to provide services for the residents, such as the hard engineering along the river bank and parks built through the finance provided by the government. Besides being reckoned as a financial loss, it can be also thought as a destroy of a chain in the working system in a region.

3. Reduce the damages on natural environment.

Meanwhile, the appearance of natural environment, which includes green-land and wild animals,is also crucial for a society because it provides the existence of biodiversity and ecological balance, the requirements of natural dynamic circulation. For example, the extinction of one creature will finally lead to the extinction of all living things on the earth. Therefore, it can help promote harmonious coexistence between cities and nature.

4. Stabilize the society.

Not only financial loss is found after the occurrence of flooding, social instability and public panic can also cause more influences in the region. By investigating the risk management of flooding, the coping capacity and community resilience will be improved.